I am a historian of the nineteenth-century United States, with interests in the broad Civil War era, religion and politics, as well as slavery and emancipation. My current book project, Faith in Republican Institutions: Lydia Maria Child and the Origins of Liberal Protestantism in Civil War—Era America links the fate of moral reform and democracy to debates over antislavery and Christian theology. It builds on my first book, Religion, Race, and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830-1880 (Cambridge University Press), which showed the significance of debates over Christian “orthodoxy” in shaping pro- and antislavery politics. It tracked the fate of gradual emancipation and colonization movements, southern abolitionism, and proslavery religion before, during, and after the Civil War.

My other publications include essays on the “long life” of proslavery religion after the end of slavery in The World the Civil War Made (University of North Carolina Press); the significance of the Civil War and emancipation to the making of conservative American evangelicalism in Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism (Eerdmans); social reform in nineteenth-century America in the Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions (Oxford University Press); and the place of religion in histories of slavery in the Journal of Southern Religion. I also introduced and edited a forum on The Future of Reconstruction Studies in the Journal of the Civil War Era. With Mark A. Noll, I co-edited Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2007). Previous work has appeared in Slavery and Abolition, Ohio Valley History, and the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society. I have served in editorial roles with the Journal of the Civil War Era and the Journal of Southern Religion. And, I sometimes write in a personal mode about punk rock and the American past.

I regularly offer undergraduate and graduate courses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, American religion, the American South, the idea of the American Dream, and other topics in American history.